Prison brutality in Georgia reveals the dark side of post-Soviet empire

The appalling brutality revealed within Georgian prisons is a stark reminder of how much remains to be done to make the post-Soviet republics fit and proper places for their citizens to live in. Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili has moved quickly to fire the Interior Minister (who is close to him) and suspend all prison officers. He should go further in restoring international confidence by asking the European Union or the Council of Europe to create a Commission of Inquiry into the film showing horrific abuse of prisoners by Georgian state functionaries.

The EU foreign policy supremo, Catherine Ashton, was right to declare that she was "appalled by the shocking footage of abuses committed against inmates in Gldani prison." Some of the graphic video footage showed a weeping half-naked male prisoner at a jail in Tbilisi begging for mercy before apparently being raped with a stick, while other images showed prison guards brutally kicking an inmate

The footage was released by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire Georgian oligarch who is worth a third of the country's GDP. Having made his fortune in Russia, Ivanishvili now wants to take over the Georgian government. He is funding the Georgian Dream opposition movement which has brought together the extremely heterogenous anti-Saakashvili forces for the parliamentary elections early next month.

Saakashvili stands down as president in 2013 and has been told by just about every international visitor (myself included) that he should not try and do a Putin by seeking to prolong his decade-long domination of Georgian politics through another office. Whether his replacement should be a fabulously rich oligarch is an open question. Ivanishvili has supported the conservative Georgian Orthodox church and education charities. But as elsewhere in the post Soviet region, the ultra-rich avert their eyes to what is going on in prisons or orphanages and undertake little of the charitable reforms that involve working with the very poor and under-class.

The brutality now revealed does not sink to the depths of what happens in Russian prisons. The death of the British-linked lawyer Sergei Magnitsky at the hands of Russian police and Putin’s prison officials, shows how the torture and unacceptable treatment of prisoners in the post-Soviet states is difficult to eliminate. But for Georgia, which claimed to have broken with the practices of the past, to be seen to allow inhumane Abu Grahib-style treatment shows how much more needs to be done.

All nations are defined by what they do to their citizens behind closed doors and how they treat those confined in prison or asylums. The Georgian state has failed that test and all its politicians – in government or those funded by a billionaire oligarch - who fight with each other for access to power and money should step back and think about how Georgia can become a nation in full conformity with the European Convention on Human Rights. There are always politicians who dislike the ECHR but European values are defined by how Europe’s state and politicians treat the weak, not by how they flatter the powerful and the rich.

Georgia should open itself to a full European inquiry into this terrible episode and agree to implement any recommendations from the EU or the Council of Europe on the treatment of prisoners and the application of justice. Russia has always refused to accept such norms but Georgia should cooperate fully and request European help in reforming its justice and prison system to ensure such tragedies never happen again.

Denis MacShane MP is a former Minister for Europe and visits Georgia regularly. He is chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Georgia and meets with opposition as well as government politicians.

The Brexit Beartraps, #2: Could dropping out of the open skies agreement cancel your holiday?

So what is it this time, eh? Brexit is going to wipe out every banana planet on the entire planet? Brexit will get the Last Night of the Proms cancelled? Brexit will bring about World War Three?

To be honest, I think we’re pretty well covered already on that last score, but no, this week it’s nothing so terrifying. It’s just that Brexit might get your holiday cancelled.

What are you blithering about now?

Well, only if you want to holiday in Europe, I suppose. If you’re going to Blackpool you’ll be fine. Or Pakistan, according to some people...

You’re making this up.

I’m honestly not, though we can’t entirely rule out the possibility somebody is. Last month Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who attracts headlines the way certain other things attract flies, warned that, “There is a real prospect... that there are going to be no flights between the UK and Europe for a period of weeks, months beyond March 2019... We will be cancelling people’s holidays for summer of 2019.”

He’s just trying to block Brexit, the bloody saboteur.

Well, yes, he’s been quite explicit about that, and says we should just ignore the referendum result. Honestly, he’s so Remainiac he makes me look like Dan Hannan.

But he’s not wrong that there are issues: please fasten your seatbelt, and brace yourself for some turbulence.

Not so long ago, aviation was a very national sort of a business: many of the big airports were owned by nation states, and the airline industry was dominated by the state-backed national flag carriers (British Airways, Air France and so on). Since governments set airline regulations too, that meant those airlines were given all sorts of competitive advantages in their own country, and pretty much everyone faced barriers to entry in others.

The EU changed all that. Since 1994, the European Single Aviation Market (ESAM) has allowed free movement of people and cargo; established common rules over safety, security, the environment and so on; and ensured fair competition between European airlines. It also means that an AOC – an Air Operator Certificate, the bit of paper an airline needs to fly – from any European country would be enough to operate in all of them.

Do we really need all these acronyms?

No, alas, we need more of them. There’s also ECAA, the European Common Aviation Area – that’s the area ESAM covers; basically, ESAM is the aviation bit of the single market, and ECAA the aviation bit of the European Economic Area, or EEA. Then there’s ESAA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which regulates, well, you can probably guess what it regulates to be honest.

All this may sound a bit dry-

It is.

-it is a bit dry, yes. But it’s also the thing that made it much easier to travel around Europe. It made the European aviation industry much more competitive, which is where the whole cheap flights thing came from.

In a speech last December, Andrew Haines, the boss of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said that, since 2000, the number of destinations served from UK airports has doubled; since 1993, fares have dropped by a third. Which is brilliant.

Brexit, though, means we’re probably going to have to pull out of these arrangements.

Stop talking Britain down.

Don’t tell me, tell Brexit secretary David Davis. To monitor and enforce all these international agreements, you need an international court system. That’s the European Court of Justice, which ministers have repeatedly made clear that we’re leaving.

So: last March, when Davis was asked by a select committee whether the open skies system would persist, he replied: “One would presume that would not apply to us” – although he promised he’d fight for a successor, which is very reassuring.

We can always holiday elsewhere.

Perhaps you can – O’Leary also claimed (I’m still not making this up) that a senior Brexit minister had told him that lost European airline traffic could be made up for through a bilateral agreement with Pakistan. Which seems a bit optimistic to me, but what do I know.

Intercontinental flights are still likely to be more difficult, though. Since 2007, flights between Europe and the US have operated under a separate open skies agreement, and leaving the EU means we’re we’re about to fall out of that, too.

Surely we’ll just revert to whatever rules there were before.

Apparently not. Airlines for America – a trade body for... well, you can probably guess that, too – has pointed out that, if we do, there are no historic rules to fall back on: there’s no aviation equivalent of the WTO.

The claim that flights are going to just stop is definitely a worst case scenario: in practice, we can probably negotiate a bunch of new agreements. But we’re already negotiating a lot of other things, and we’re on a deadline, so we’re tight for time.

In fact, we’re really tight for time. Airlines for America has also argued that – because so many tickets are sold a year or more in advance – airlines really need a new deal in place by March 2018, if they’re to have faith they can keep flying. So it’s asking for aviation to be prioritised in negotiations.

The only problem is, we can’t negotiate anything else until the EU decides we’ve made enough progress on the divorce bill and the rights of EU nationals. And the clock’s ticking.

This is just remoaning. Brexit will set us free.

A little bit, maybe. CAA’s Haines has also said he believes “talk of significant retrenchment is very much over-stated, and Brexit offers potential opportunities in other areas”. Falling out of Europe means falling out of European ownership rules, so itcould bring foreign capital into the UK aviation industry (assuming anyone still wants to invest, of course). It would also mean more flexibility on “slot rules”, by which airports have to hand out landing times, and which are I gather a source of some contention at the moment.

But Haines also pointed out that the UK has been one of the most influential contributors to European aviation regulations: leaving the European system will mean we lose that influence. And let’s not forget that it was European law that gave passengers the right to redress when things go wrong: if you’ve ever had a refund after long delays, you’ve got the EU to thank.

So: the planes may not stop flying. But the UK will have less influence over the future of aviation; passengers might have fewer consumer rights; and while it’s not clear that Brexit will mean vastly fewer flights, it’s hard to see how it will mean more, so between that and the slide in sterling, prices are likely to rise, too.

It’s not that Brexit is inevitably going to mean disaster. It’s just that it’ll take a lot of effort for very little obvious reward. Which is becoming something of a theme.

Still, we’ll be free of those bureaucrats at the ECJ, won’t be?

This’ll be a great comfort when we’re all holidaying in Grimsby.

Jonn Elledge edits the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric, and writes for the NS about subjects including politics, history and Brexit. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.